How many rest periods per level?

[xnosipjpqmhd]

Well, let's see. The last campaign ran from 23 Wealsun (1st level) to 15 Goodmonth (~10th level). That's 10 levels in 8 weeks of game time, or about 1 level every 5 days of adventuring, which is much faster than I would normally have liked, but the players were hot to trot and were getting a LOT of stuff done! ;-)

(Also, if it makes any difference to you, we were not playing 3.5e.)

ironregime

 

[KRT]

I think it depends on the campaign. I have one group of players trying to tackle Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil but the idea of going in hundreds of times was old so we decided to see if they could do it in one day non-stop. They barely stop to grab loot (basically using the appraise skill to determine if a sword is better than the one they are using) they pick it up and keep going. They went in with a bunch of wands of various cure. In the 24 straight hours the characters have been in the dungeon they have leveled up from 6th to 10th without a break. It took over a year of playing to do the outer ring before they gave up and stopped for a break.

There was a real sense of urgency when they did it that way but it was an exhausting way to play. It will take me a week just to figure out what loot there is lying around.
So I would say this is one extreme. I've also played in a campaign where we avoided a lot of encounters and it took months to go up levels.

 

[Borlon]

4 levels in 24 hours! Wow!!

I had proposed that a spellcaster might recharge (Ability Mod) times per level, plus 1 per month or something, but someone took offense at this. But it sounds like this variant would be highly suited to the kind "extreme dungeoneering" you describe. Just waive the rest requirement, and let a spellcaster recharge in 15 minutes.

 

[KRT]

4 levels in 24 hours! Wow!!

24 hours in game played over a year and a bit of real time. They hardly used any of their memorized spells. It was mostly scroll, wands, and potions. I was reminded of what a firing range looks like after you've been spewing shell casings around for an hour target practice. Wandering monsters would be wondering what all these empty vials, blank pages, and wooden sticks were doing lying all over the place.

 

[Shemeska]

This is kinda along the same lines as the other post (How fast do your characters advance in level? But rather than sessions, I am curious how often parties rest between levels.

Theoretically there are about 4 moderate encounters per day (between rests) and 13 such encounters before levelling up. So that should be 3 or 4 rest periods. People might have fewer, bigger encounters, but that should make them level faster, and the number of rests should stay the same.

So what are people's experiences? When I find what the usual range of responses is, I might post a poll.

I don't set some arbitrary period of rest based on what theoretical number of encounters the PCs 'should' have.

The PCs choose when they rest based on when they feel they need to plus based on when they feel it safe to do so. It's entirely based on where they are and what they've gotten themselves into. If they're in the 398th layer of the Abyss it's not going to be easy to find a place to rest, regardless of how many encounters they've had or the CR of those encounters. It feels contrived to me to go out of my way to insert 'rest points' in the middle of that.